


Will to Survive

by SylphofScript



Series: Warren is Strange [3]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Character Death, Explicit Language, M/M, Same warnings as the game in general
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 15:17:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17347580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylphofScript/pseuds/SylphofScript
Summary: Warren dies.From a drabble I wrote one time when I had a rough flight and needed to channel my frustration out. Not canon to the W/S timeline, but does happen in the W/S universe. Contains pretty big spoilers for Whale Song, actually, so I recommend reading up to at least chapter 9 of that first.Be warned. This is not happy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Putting this up on here from Tumblr since it's an extra story that can be read for funsies for the AU. Also, worried Tumblr will go hellfire on my ass one of these days and I'll lose it.

The last thing he sees before the black overtakes him is Nathan’s face, contorted in a way he’s never wanted to see and splattered with blood—whose blood? His blood? Warren can’t tell, because his thoughts are slipping away faster than he can think them, and he can’t seem to do anything to hold on. But it scares him, Nathan’s expression. The blood that coats it. It scares the hell out of him, and all he wants to do is reach out and wipe it all away. But he can’t move. He tries, but nothing happens. He can’t move at all.

The last thing he hears is a whisper of a voice building instantaneously to a scream, wrapped around a word he doesn’t realize is  _Warren_ until he’s teetering in the very edge.

And then, with the memory of his name swathed in agony dispersing into the nothingness, Warren is gone.

 

* * *

 

When Warren wakes up, it feels less like a waking than it does a slow opening of his eyes. As if he were never really asleep, just resting them until a moment when it felt right to open them back up again.

When Warren wakes up, it’s slowly, with a calm settled deep in his chest and an ease to his bones. With a breath that feels like a balm to his soul and a lifting of the fog in his mind. It’s with a comfort in his surroundings and a lack of worry for what could have happened or what could happen next. It’s with thoughts clear of all the terrors he’d gathered in the past few months. It’s with a detached sort of acknowledgement that it had happened, it had passed, and it had become who he once was.

When Warren wakes up, it’s to Rachel sitting on her couch with her head nestled in her palm, not unlike the first time they had met, watching him silently. Warren pulls himself up into a sitting position, feeling lighter than he ever thought possible, and her eyes track his movement unblinkingly.

He doesn’t say anything to her, because he’s not sure what’s going on. Nothing comes to mind when he tries to think of what he should do next, and nothing tells him to do anything more than sit on the floor and return the gaze Rachel kept on him. After an undetermined amount of time, finally, Rachel moves, dropping her hand from her chin and crossing it with her other at the forearms in her lap. Her hands drape across her knees, and Warren notices offhandedly that her nails are now painted black.

“Hey, kid,” she greets him softly. Warren continues to stare at her. She doesn’t move again, she doesn’t even seem to breathe, but her expression slowly grows more and more solemn the longer he keeps his gaze locked into her. And with the darkening of her expression, Warren’s comprehension grows.

Rachel was here. Wherever he was—her room, it looks like—Rachel was too, which could only mean one of two things. That the timeline has slipped again, or he was—

The memory slams into him like a wrecking ball through mortar and brick, and Warren flinches away from Rachel as if he’d been shot before crumbling down around himself.

There’d been an argument. An accident, a stranger with a knife and a dog with a stupid name. Frank—and one of Frank’s clients? Money had been owed, Nathan had gone to pay. They had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and Nathan had gotten mouthy when his family name had been ground into the dirt by the druggie stranger that had showed up out of nowhere spitting curses and demanding things he didn’t deserve, and then it had escalated to the point where Warren had instinctively intervened the moment he saw the weapon being drawn on Nathan, and now—

And now, Warren was dead.

Warren had been killed.

“No,” he mutters, no louder than a breath. “No. No, no. I can’t be dead. I’m not—I don’t— I can’t be dead.”

Wordlessly, Rachel stands up and makes her way over to his side. She doesn’t touch him—doesn’t even speak to him—she just watches as everything sinks in. Warren wants to ask her what’s happening to him—what’s  _going_ to happen to him—but something like horror engulfs him and spawns itself in the form of the last thing he saw, and all at once all he cares about is a single thing.

“Nathan,” Warren chokes, pivoting and grasping Rachel’s shoulder with more force than he means to. To her credit, she doesn’t even flinch. “You have to show me Nathan. I need— fuck, is he okay? Is he hurt?”

Rachel looks at him sadly. “You know the answer to that question.”

“Show me,” Warren pleads without hesitation, knowing she can.

“You don’t want to see that. Trust me.” She shakes her head slowly, arms crossed over her chest. “There’s a reason most people don’t look back.”

Warren realizes somewhere in the back of his mind that Rachel had just unveiled something about the afterlife that he previously could never have hoped to know, but he has no attention to focus in on it, and it’s lost to some niche of his brain as he pushes on. “ _Please_ , Rachel,” he begs. “I need to see.”

Rachel watches him for a long moment, then sighs and snaps her fingers. Despite the way he reacted before and the fact he was unsteady on his feet as it was, Warren doesn’t feel the same dropping sensation he had the last times the atmosphere had changed around him, and he knows that it’s because, this time, he belongs. But he pushes that away, because it can’t be true. It  _can’t_.

The scene of the fort room changes to the familiar darkness of Nathan’s room, looking exactly the same as it had when they’d left it to go to meet Frank. For a moment, Warren wonders why Rachel had taken him to a place Nathan wasn’t, but then he catches sight of not one but two figures crowded in the far corner of Nathan’s room, nearly obscured by the edge of the couch in the dark of the room that nearly renders them gray. As he hurries around to see more, Warren recognizes Victoria by her bright blonde hair first, then the subtle dark red of her blouse that Warren realizes after a moment is splattered wet with something even darker.

She’s crouched over the form of what is unmistakably Nathan, curled up in a ball without his shirt on. There’s a gash marring the right side of his chest, curving along the edge into his ribs, and Victoria is pressing a cloth of some kind into it. Warren hears himself make a noise of alarm, but he’s frozen where he stands, horror and a rage unlike anything he’s ever experience before filling him and boiling white-hot through his veins.

“Whoa.” A hand wraps around his forearm as Rachel manifests behind him, her voice hushed. “Easy there, tiger. You’re disrupting the field.”

With a jolt, Warren notices black spots, previously easily missed in the lightless abyss that was Nathans room, tearing into the fabric of … whatever the hell this shit was. When he forces himself to calm down, if only a little, they melt away again. If Warren weren’t so heavily focused on what was happening before him, he’d question it. But he couldn’t care enough to—not when Nathan was in front of him. Not when Nathan looked half-dead himself, and Victoria was dropping the cloth in favor of cupping both of Nathan’s cheeks with her hands and turning him to face her. Two of the nails on her right hand are jagged and bleeding, which tells Warren a story he doesn’t bother to hear in favor of the unintelligible murmuring Victoria starts up.

She holds Nathan’s face gently, tilting it up towards her as the thumb of her hand sweeps across the wetness of his cheek with a tenderness Warren can  _feel_ , and it’s in this moment he finds he has never been so thankful of Victoria’s existence in Nathan’s life. She might have been the biggest wall between him and Nathan, but she was a protector, and she would watch Nathan for him. Just like she had when Rachel’s body had been found and Warren had forgotten what she had once meant to Nathan.

“I’m sorry, Nate,” Warren hears Victoria whisper suddenly, clearly, and a sniffle two steps from a whimper follows. Warren can’t tell if she’s crying for him or for Nathan, or for both. But she’s crying, and that fact alone jars him. “God. I’m so sorry.”

Nathan’s face crumples, his lips peeling back to bare teeth in a snarl of agony, and he lets out a jagged moan that Warren feels in his gut. Right in that moment, with Nathan’s cry curdling the air, Warren nearly goes insane with an instinctual need to make it all right again. To fix what he’d broken—to do anything he could to right what was wrong.

To do  _exactly_ what Rachel had chosen him to do at the start of it all.

Victoria lurches on her knees to pull Nathan into her shoulder, but it does little to muffle the sincerity of Nathan’s loss.

“I can’t do this. I can’t do this, Vic. I  _can’t_.” Nathan’s words are strained in a way that twists Warren’s heart in his chest and eggs him to intervene where he knows he can’t. His hands, still coated in dried blood and peppered with traces of the dirt Warren had died on, fist Victoria’s shirt along her back, but she doesn’t even flinch. If anything, she only holds him tighter. “I’m so fucking  _tired_ of  _everything_ being  _taken from me_.”

It’s with the cruel cry of Nathan’s voice echoing in Warren’s ears that the room dissolves back to what it had been before, but Warren can’t find the will to move from where he’s rooted, the ghost of Nathan and his words plastered across every of Warren’s senses.

“He wouldn’t let Frank touch you,” Rachel murmurs from behind him. “Wouldn’t let anyone touch him either. Refused treatment. That’s why he’s sitting there and bleeding all over Victoria.”

Warren clenches his teeth tighter, ignoring the way his jaw pops in response. He was dead after all—what dead person gave a shit about their dental integrity? “Show me,” he grinds out.

“No.” Rachel’s response is short, concise, and utterly unyielding.

Warren rounds on her like a whip, using the handful of inches he had on her to loom as threateningly as he knew how. Which wasn’t much at all, but it didn’t deter him. “ _Show me_ ,” he pushes.

Rachel meets his gaze, and it was as if she had turned to stone. “No.”

Warren holds her unforgiving look, then lifts his fist and lashes it through the air like a child and pivots away with a hiss of a curse. Rachel’s tone is firm when she tells him, “You don’t need to see that. You don’t understand the kind of pain seeing that will cause.”

“I  _want_ it!” Warren spits back at her, his tone high enough to border on whining, but she doesn’t take the bait. “I want to  _see_.”

“Nathan wouldn’t.”

That stops Warren cold. For a moment, he almost accuses her of not knowing Nathan well enough to make that assumption, but he knows that wouldn’t be true. Rachel knew too much, despite what she might claim otherwise. And she was right—Nathan wouldn’t want Warren to see that.

Warren fights the urge to argue anyway, if only so he could understand more. His nails bite sharply into the skin of his palms, but the sting brings no clarity like it might have once before. In death, the clarity couldn’t be avoided or marred. His mind was the clearest it had been since before he’d tried to save the bay—potentially even longer. It was the fact he didn’t know everything he could about what was happening that kept him in a state of confusion and frustration.

“Can you at least tell me if he’s going to be okay?” Warren asks after he’s reigned in his struggle, then realizes he has more to worry about than just Nathan—Max, Alyssa, his parents. Maybe even Chloe and Brooke. “If  _anyone_ is?” he corrects.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know yet,” she responds, a hint of an apology in her voice. Warren senses her moving more than he hears her and can feel her beside him before he looks in her direction. “I know time isn’t really linear,” she amends quietly before Warren can open his mouth, “but I haven’t been dead long enough to overwrite what I was taught.”

That only spurs the worry in Warren. Because while most of the people in his life would handle losing him in their own ways, only Nathan was destructive enough to ruin himself. Warren had to trust Victoria would take care of him where Warren couldn’t, but that wasn’t enough for him. Not when Victoria had failed in timelines that no longer existed to them.

In turn, this either occurs to Rachel at the same time it does Warren, or she’d known all along, because, with a sigh worthy of someone letting something immensely important go, she raises her hand and gestures for Warren to bend down.

Without daring to ask questions, Warren does. But she doesn’t show him what he expects.

Rachel’s fingers touch down on Warren’s cheek, and then, without the pain he thinks he should have along with everything else, he’s  _there_. He can’t see anything—there’s no sense of sight attached to this … memory, vision, time, whatever the fuck it was Rachel was doing—but he can hear. And he can  _feel_.

He can feel the wet warmth that soaks into the torn shirt he wears as he bleeds out (bastard must have struck him well for how cracked out he seemed to be, Warren idly thinks), can feel the rough skin that covers Nathan’s hands as they press against his chest, his neck, his face. He can feel his head being angled in a direction, even as it doesn’t move outside of the vision, and he can hear the distant cry of his name, tinny and echoed as if it were a call from across the world in an era they had long passed.

He can feel Nathan’s hands clutch, then slacken, then clutch yet again along the underside of his jaw, thumbs smearing sticky fingerprints against the hollows of his cheeks and across the length of skin to his ears. He can hear the gravely, begging chant of his name mixed with a broken chorus of “ _no_ ” and “ _shit_ ” and “ _don’t you fucking_ touch  _me_ ” that is undeniably Nathan at his very worst. He can hear another voice, but it’s too far away to make out any of the words, and then a spot along his jaw blooms with a damp heat once again. It’s followed immediately by a gasping sort of sob and a final, colorful curse, and then it’s all gone as fast as it had come.

Rachel’s not looking at him when Warren opens eyes he hadn’t realize he’d closed, and she’s got one of her hands cradled in the other and pressed to her chest. She looks paler than she had just before, bruise-like circles staining the skin just beneath her eyes, with the darkness surrounding her expression visibly growing. When she finally does look at him, it’s with a sharp flick of her eyes, and she looks ghostlier and more haunted than she ever has before.

 _Because she’s_ dead _, you idiot_ , Warren thinks.  _And so are you._

“You have to put me back,” Warren whispers when neither of them says anything. His fight is gone, and all he’s left with are the dregs of the timid person he’d been once before. “I need to be there. With  _him_. You have to put me back. I can’t stay here. I can’t—I  _can’t_ , Rachel.”

“I can’t do that. You know I can’t, Warren. I control time. I’m not Hades.” She hesitates long enough to worry her lip. “I don’t even know how that shit works.”

“But I don’t  _belong_ here!”

Rachel’s response comes after a pause, one that allowed Warren to hear his lie fill the space between them before she corrected him with the truth he didn’t want to hear.

“You do now,” she murmurs. And she’s right.

Now, Warren truly belongs.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I mention there's now an "alternate" ending? ;)
> 
> ==>


	2. Chapter 2

But Warren wasn’t going to accept that.

Rachel was a god. An honest to—well, God, actually— _god._ She could do things, things even she didn’t realize she was capable of when she first started all of this. She’d changed things before, saved Warren from his own demise again and again—why couldn’t she now?

Warren reaches for her, aiming to clutch at the corner of her shirt, and ends up touching his fingers to her hand instead. Her skin is ice cold, and her body hums with energy.

_She is a god._

“Time— _time_ , you control time,” Warren starts, rushing out the words before Rachel can stop him. “Turn it back. Please, Rachel. You have to turn it back. Take me back to before we meet Frank. _Please_.”

Rachel looks down at her hands, then up at her collages. All at once, and only for a moment, every single picture flares with color too bright for Warren to look at, and he winces away with a hand flying up to shield his face.

“You’re asking me to chance ruining everything?” she asks him quietly. “After _finally_ getting it all right? You want me to risk it just so you can go back to a boy you _loathed_ before I changed that, too?”

“I—” Warren starts, then has to stop when he doesn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to risk losing it all. Not when he was the only true casualty in the end. He barely even hears himself when he whispers, “Yes. I’m in love with him.”

“And you think I _wasn’t_?!” Rachel’s voice booms, amplified by a force Warren can only think of as otherworldly, and even the air quivers around him with her words. “Don’t fucking tell me you think I wasn’t willing to give _everything_ to save that town. To save the people _I_ loved.”

“You were trying to get away from it,” Warren mutters back, all the fight he’d felt gone in a flash. Rachel rounds on him, looking fierce and spiteful. She’s almost _glowing_ with it.

“And yet,” she responds slowly, allowing each word to dig its way to Warren’s very core, “in the end. I. Still. _Died_.”

Warren blinks rapidly. He didn’t have anything new to say—no argument to give that was capable of going up against potential ruination. He had nothing, and they both knew that. Eventually, all he can do is shake his head, slowly. “I’m sorry. I—just. I’m sorry.”

Silence meets his words. And then, Rachel lets out a noise between a sigh and a growl and grabs his shoulder. Warren tries not to trip and stumble over his own legs as she drags him to the door of the fort. “Dammit,” she says as she pulls, sounding like she’s talking to herself more than him. “You don’t give up, do you?”

 _You picked me for a reason_ , Warren wants to say. For his own sake, though, this time he holds his tongue. Once she’s got him where she wants him, standing in front of the door with his back to it, Rachel crosses her arms with a huff and studies him. After a long moment of silence and scrutiny, Warren starts to fidget.

“Okay,” Rachel finally says, lilting her head away. She gnaws at her lip, the fingers of one hand tapping mercilessly against the arm it clutched, and then shakes her head just once. “I can’t promise this will work,” she states hurriedly. Warren’s head snaps up, hope bursting in his chest like a firework before he can stop himself.

He must look it, because Rachel’s eyes narrow when they look at him. “Don’t. Stop, I don’t know if this will work. At _all_ , Warren.”

“But it’s something,” Warren croaks, then swallows around the lump that springs in his throat. “There’s a chance.”

“A fucking small-as-shit one,” Rachel mumbles, then turns away and paces a quick loop around the small area of her fort, her ratty Converse rapidly smacking against the hardwood of the floors. When she stops, it’s sudden, right next to Warren, and he startles away from her. “You’ll lose some time,” she tells him seriously. Her eyes are chips of hardened earth in her face. Gneiss. Rainforest Rhyolite. Confusionite.

Despite not really needing to in the first place, Warren realizes he’s stopped breathing, and the air is lodged in his chest like a weight that couldn’t be lifted.

“I’ll take it,” he whispers back, emotion choking him up. “I’ll take anything, just put me back.”

Rachel shakes her head roughly, her hair whipping around her shoulders and her blue feather earring dancing with the motion, and she turns away from him sharply and takes a deep breath. Then another. And then another. Then, she turns back again, her eyes burning. _Glowing_.

With a final, heavy sigh, Rachel nods at Warren once and, without warning, shoves him hard with both of her hands. Warren stumbles over himself, crying out in surprise, and catches his foot on the threshold of the door he hadn’t realized had opened at some point when he wasn’t paying attention. And then, with a sudden darkness that blots Rachel’s face out, Warren is gone.

 

* * *

 

When Warren wakes up, it’s with a gasp. It’s with an ache in his heart and a jolt so familiar it almost brings him to tears on the spot.

When Warren wakes up, he’s already in full motion, and he causes Nathan to launch from the bed—Warren’s bed—spitting a rough curse and flailing without a certain grace he might have had in another life. He stumbles over himself and falls to the floor with a muffled thump.

“Jesus _fucking_ mother fucking  _Graham_ fucking fuck _fuck_.”

“Sorry,” Warren immediately says, but it comes out as less of a word and more of a squeak. He tries to clear his throat, but he’s too busy gulping down a round of gasps to manage. It gets Nathan’s attention like nothing else, the struggling, and he’s back in the bed and clutching Warren’s shirt in his fists before Warren has the brain power needed to process the movement in the first place.

“Graham?” he whispers, but it sounds like a plea.

“Nightmare,” Warren rasps like a chant. “Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare, holy—fucking _nightmare_.”

Nathan slumps down in relief, fingers instantly loosening their hold, and Warren in turn slumps against him. His nose meets mussed hair, the slept-on gelled locks trying their best to invade his nasal cavity, and he has to turn his head slightly to keep from sneezing. Warren breathes into them, and, in turn, Nathan breathes back into him. Warren can feel his chest rising, falling, and rising again, and he remembers then what it means to really be alive.

“You’re going to kill me one of these days,” Nathan murmurs into Warren’s collarbones. Warren closes his eyes and wills himself not to break down over Nathan’s poor choice of words. It’s not as if it were an unusual occurrence anyway.

“Can we just stay in our pajamas today and watch stupid movies and play video games?” Warren asks after a moment.

Nathan hesitates. “I have to meet Frank today. He’s bitching about his payment.”

Warren could swear his heart stops in his chest right then. He goes ridged, and he knows Nathan feels it when he does.

“The fuck?” Nathan pulls back, boring his squinted eyes into Warren like they could see inside his head. “What’s your issue?”

“I—” Warren tries, but finds he doesn’t have the right words. “Can you do it tomorrow? Please?”

“… Okay,” Nathan amends finally, still looking at Warren like he’s lost his shit and didn’t have a hope of getting it back. “Shit, fine. Okay. I’ll catch him at the diner tomorrow. What is _up_ with you? The nightmare was seriously that bad?”

Warren breathes a sigh of relief, tears pricking at the rims of his eyelids. When he opens his eyes again, Nathan’s looking at him in startled bewilderment.

“You have no idea,” he tells Nathan. “Rachel is fucking awesome, though.”

Nathan pulls back further, his eyes searching Warren’s in that relentless way he had. “Did you…?” he asks hesitantly.

Warren’s lips press together. It was a question he wasn’t sure he actually had an answer to. He swallows. “I don’t know. But, just. Not today, okay?”

Nathan’s eyes continue to search him, and Warren knows there’s a semblance of something like fear to the way he doesn’t give up. Whatever he sees, it’s enough for him to relent with a single, curt nod. “Not today.”

And just like that, Warren is saved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You didn't _really_ think I'd let him get away with dying after all that, did you? ;D


End file.
